Review of Swimming by Enza Gandolfo

Kate Wilks is a swimmer; she moves far more easily in the water than she does on land, and she has been swimming all her life. The symbol of water is all through this first novel by Enza Gandolfo, and makes for a flowing feel, the words sometimes drifting, sometimes whirlpooling, sometimes rushing, crashing, or still.

But Kate, now near sixty, meets up with her ex-husband, the sculptor Tom, at a photography exhibition. Kate is the subject of one of the photographs, naked and standing in the sea; the photographer is her best friend Lynne’s daughter, Tess, both mother and daughter are very important in Kate’s life. But Tom unexpectedly asks her ‘Do you think…we might have stayed together if we’d had children?’ (11).

And this question becomes the impetus for Kate to go back into her memories of trying to have a baby. She digs out an unfinished manuscript called ‘Writing Sarah’, a collection of fragments and chapters that describes her thoughts and feelings as she fell pregnant, only to miscarry each time. The core of the book is Kate’s exploration of what it means to be childless, to want a baby so badly that you give her a name and imagine her so clearly that she almost becomes real. Almost, but not quite.

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